Brigid held Abigail’s hand tightly as they followed Magistrate Kane along the corridor of the Cobaltville medical hub. Abi’s movements were sluggish, and she had yawned several times on the way over. Brigid tried her best not to worry herself about the girl. If she and Kane were right, then there were much more significant things to occupy her mind right now than how tired her niece was feeling.
Kane stopped outside a door marked 17. “This is it, Baptiste,” he said, and waited to see what she wanted to do next.
Brigid looked up and down the corridor until she saw a grouping of comfortable chairs a little way down from the next door along. She turned to Abi and instructed the girl to go sit there quietly until they came to get her.
As Abi walked off to the chairs, Kane spoke to Brigid in a quiet voice. “Seems like a good kid.”
“She is.” Brigid nodded. “I hate for her to get mixed up in all this. She’s scared enough already.”
“It isn’t going to matter if she hears, you know,” Kane reminded her, “not if we’re right.”
Brigid nodded slowly as she watched Abi climb onto the chairs and sit down. “I know,” she said, “but old habits die hard, and I love her, Kane.”
Silently, Kane pushed open the door and ushered Brigid inside the room.
Within, Brigid saw a hulking, dark-skinned man lying faceup on a high bed, gazing up at the ceiling of the darkened room. The shades had been left open and the night lights of Cobaltville played across the room through the window. Brigid looked at the man, unfamiliar as he was, saw the mound of his body that was hidden by the sheets, and flinched when she realized how its length ceased just past his waist.
“This is my partner, Magistrate Grant,” Kane explained. “Grant, meet Brigid Baptiste.”
“Baptiste,” Grant repeated, not taking his eyes from the ceiling as he rolled the name over his tongue. “I don’t remember any Baptiste.” He turned to look at her then, and saw the vibrant red hair, like flames framing her porcelain face. “Ah, the redhead,” he muttered, nodding.
Brigid smiled, holding out her hand to shake Grant’s. “You two have spoken about me, I guess.”
“A little,” Grant told her, a wide smile on his own face as he shook her hand. “Kane tell you his theory?”
“We discussed it,” Brigid said.
Kane stepped closer to the bed, acknowledging his longtime partner with a brush of knuckles against knuckles before he continued. “Baptiste has some insight into this that may help us,” he explained.
“I’ve been thinking about it myself,” Grant said, “but why don’t you kids go first.”
Brigid pulled a seat over and sat beside Grant’s bed while Kane paced the room, glancing out the window from time to time as though anticipating something bad coming from the skies or the other buildings.
“I have a very specific memory trait,” Brigid told Grant, “known as eidetic. You’d probably know it better by its popular term—a photographic memory.”
“I didn’t think that really existed.” Grant laughed.
“It’s rare but not unheard-of,” Brigid assured him. “Statistically, young children are especially prone to display the ability of perfect recall, but most of them lose that talent as they get older. I happen to be the rare exception.”
“And this helps us how?” Grant encouraged.
“This is the only world I’ve ever known,” Brigid stated, gesturing to the view of the skyline through the window. “It seems real and solid. It fits every memory that I appear to have. But my subconscious has been sending me messages for the past two days. Messages that suggest that the whole thing is a lie.”
“The whole thing?” Grant mimicked, unsure what the woman meant.
“The structures of perception have broken down, Magistrate Grant,” Brigid told him, “and it is my belief that our interpretations of the world about us can no longer be trusted.”
Grant nodded. “Kane thinks we’re in a prison—he tell you that?”
Brigid nodded. “He had me pegged for one of the jailers. But I’m not. Not so far as I know, at least.”
Grant looked at Kane, then back to Baptiste. “So, here’s what I’ve been thinking,” Grant began. “There’s a woman here, a nurse called Elaine and she’s—” he shrugged “—very attractive. I mean, she would be any man’s dream. The woman practically threw herself at me, a messed-up, crippled Mag with bad attitude. Threw herself.”
Kane looked impatient. “Your point, partner?”
Grant’s eyes narrowed as he looked at his partner. “Dreams, Kane. The dream girl. The whole thing. I think we’re dreaming.”
“Crazy,” Kane spat.
“No, it’s not,” Grant told him. “The whole setup works with dream logic. Me and the nurse, the job. You and—What, Kane?”
“His mother,” Brigid stated, when Kane failed to answer.
“Ms. Baptiste here and…” Grant encouraged.
“Abigail,” Brigid responded immediately. “My niece.”
“Dreams and desire,” Grant said. “We all get what we want.”
“But how do we all dream the same dream?” Kane asked.
“It is impossible for two minds to dream the same dream,” Brigid prompted.
“It’s not our dream,” Grant said. “We’re players in someone else’s dream, and we’re being played, too.”
“Whose dream?” Kane asked.
“Right now,” Grant said thoughtfully, “the dreamer is the closest thing to a supreme being—to God—that we have.”
“Trapped in the God dream,” Kane muttered incredulously, shaking his head. “This is not good.”
“We can’t see the waking edges of the dream,” Grant continued, “but we know they must be there. We just need to find them.”
In silence, the three of them considered Grant’s speculations. As they quietly pondered, turning the idea over in their heads, the door to the room opened and Abigail stood there, slouching her shoulders.
“Auntie Brigid,” Abi moaned. “Can we go home yet? I’m really yawny.”
Brigid looked at the cherubic girl as she came over to rest her head on her lap. “I know, munchkin,” Brigid whispered, stroking Abigail’s hair. “We’re all tired. Won’t be very long now, I promise.”
Abi rested against Brigid’s legs and gazed at the man in the bed. Then she let out a little shriek and turned away. “What happened to that man?” she squeaked, screwing her eyes shut tight.
Brigid pulled Abi closer. “Shh, Abi,” she said, “it’s okay. This is Grant. He’s our friend.”
“What happened?” Abi asked again.
“We’re not sure,” Brigid said, not really thinking about Abigail’s question so much as the question that underpinned it, a scholar once more.
At the side of the room, Kane pushed the remaining two chairs together and suggested that Abigail lie down. Brigid sat with her, silently watching the lights twinkling through the window, stroking Abi’s hair until the girl fell asleep.
Finally, Kane broke the silence, keeping his voice low. “What are we going to do?” he asked.
Brigid looked up at him and Grant, her sleeping niece’s head resting on her lap. “I don’t want to leave,” she said.
Kane almost choked with surprise. “Are you crazy, Baptiste? What the hell do you mean, you don’t want to leave?”
Brigid let her breath out slowly before she spoke, her voice steady. “I have everything I could ever want right here,” she said, stroking Abi’s blond hair gently. “Why would I leave?”
“Because it’s a trap,” Kane whispered harshly. “Because we’ve been stuck inside a dream cage.”
Brigid looked at him, then at Grant, her expression serious. “But what if this isn’t a prison? Maybe this is our reward,” she said, “for everything we’ve done in that other world. Maybe this is Heaven. Did you ever think about that, Magistrate?”
Fury bubbling within, Kane began to say something but stopped himself, looking at the angelic girl resting her head on the archivist’s lap. “Maybe you’re right,” he allowed.
The three of them remained in silence in the darkened room as Brigid’s words sank in. Finally, Grant spoke up. “But it’s not real,” he pointed out.
“Does that matter?” Brigid asked. “It feels real enough. Your mother feels real, right, Kane?”
Kane was silent.
Grant’s eyes fixed on his partner. “Kane?” he prompted.
“I need to think about this,” Kane admitted.
“What’s to think about?” Grant challenged. “If we’re right, then it’s not real—it’s just smoke and mirrors.”
Kane looked at the crippled man lying in the bed. “Did you ever regret waking up from a dream, Grant? Ever find yourself wishing you could just go back to sleep and return to it?”
Grant breathed through clenched teeth, trying to work out the argument in his head. “Now, Baptiste here I get. She’s got her daughter—”
“Niece,” Kane corrected automatically.
“Niece, then,” Grant continued, waving it away. “But you? What do you have here, Kane? As long as there’s a never-ending supply of perps to catch and you can have lunch with your dead mom every now and then you’ll be happy as a fly in shit? Is that really what you think?”
Kane looked at Grant, vexation lining his brow. “What did we come from, Grant? What did we…escape from? War? Plague? Something worse? What if we chose to come here? What if we’re not the only ones who chose this life? What if we’re the only ones who suspect there was ever anything else?”
“What if we break down the gates of Heaven and find we can’t get back in?” Brigid added.
Grant lay back on the bed, feeling his thoughts churning. “You came to me with this, Kane,” he said patiently. “You came to me with your suspicions and you made me doubt everything.”
“I’m sorry,” Kane whispered. Then he turned and left the room, pulling the door closed behind him.
Brigid looked at the Magistrate lying in the bed before her. “I’m sorry, too, Magistrate,” she told Grant, lifting Abi’s head and extricating herself from beneath it. “I think I should be going. Abi should be in her own bed.”
“Yeah,” Grant said. “We all should. But unless we fight this, we’ll never get to be in our own beds ever again, Ms. Baptiste. Isn’t that the point?”
“I know.” Brigid nodded, carefully lifting Abi from the chairs and cradling her in her arms as she made her way to the door.
Grant watched the door close behind Brigid Baptiste, and then he cursed, over and over, feeling all the tension in his broken body. “This whole place is wrong,” he said finally, speaking to nothing but thin air.
IN REALWORLD, in another cave within the vast complex of the Original Tribe, Cloud Singer stood before the council elders as they listened to her plea from behind their battered and worn wooden table. Many years before, the long table had served in a bar, and its rich, dark surface still showed the rings where wet glasses had been left upon it for too long.
“Everything is in place to destroy Cerberus,” Cloud Singer told them, an arrogance to the way she held her head high in such exalted company.
The elders looked at her with piercing eyes until she shrank a little, taking a half step backward. Behind her, Broken Ghost waited in the shadows, having agreed to listen to the plea but making no promises to contribute. Broken Ghost considered this an irrelevance. The campaign was already in motion, the endgame approaching fast; they did not need their movements to be sanctioned by the elder council now. It was a warrior’s right to avenge his or her war brothers.
The eldest of the council, a man with an age-lined face and a patchy gray beard that fell down to his little pot belly, spoke in a voice like crinkling autumn leaves. “The tribe must always strive to remake the world, to better it for everyone, Cloud Singer,” he said. “Can you assure me that your actions will do this?”
Cloud Singer nodded. “Cerberus stands in the way of that goal,” she said. “They have interfered before in our plans—”
“The council is aware of this,” a white-haired woman at the end of the table interrupted.
“They stood against my field team when we went to retrieve the Death Cry,” Cloud Singer continued. “We lost our best warriors and we failed to secure the weapon itself.”
“Which makes this sound like a revenge mission,” the council leader stated. “The Original Tribe must hold themselves above such things, girl.”
Cloud Singer stood still, aware that all eyes were upon her, unable to think of what to say.
And then the assassin, Broken Ghost, spoke from the rear of the cave. “The actions of the Cerberus personnel on that day infected the Dreaming. In six weeks it will be unusable.”
“The council recognizes the wet worker—Broken Ghost,” said the secretary of the board as the pale-skinned assassin stepped forward.
“They are like a rabid dog, snapping at the tribe’s heels without any comprehension of the damage that they do,” Broken Ghost elaborated. “If we do not put the dog out of its misery, it will become an insurmountable obstacle to our happiness, and to our overall mission—the betterment of man.”
The bearded council leader nodded once. “Your point is well made, wet worker,” he said in his frail, ancient voice. “We wish you success in your endeavor, Cloud Singer.”
“Thank you,” Cloud Singer said quietly, bowing once to the council. Then she turned on her heel and joined Broken Ghost as the assassin led the way from the cave. “And thank you, as well, Ghost,” Cloud Singer added as she caught up with the older woman.
Broken Ghost looked at her, the skull face drawn over her own like a specter. “Whatever they had said, the project is too near completion to halt now. I said what I said to smooth things over, for when we return. Nothing more. You walk the assassin’s path now, Cloud Singer.”
“But you accepted the task from me as soon as I approached you,” Cloud Singer said as they paced through the tunnels, past the flickering torches that lit the passages within the rock. “Why?”
“When Bad Father died I lost my mentor and my patron,” Broken Ghost stated simply. “The council has always feared me, but he did not. Thus, without him, I have no mission.”
“Then why didn’t you join us when we went to the mountain range in Russia to retrieve the Death Cry?” Cloud Singer asked.
“Because if I had gone, I would have done so alone,” Broken Ghost replied simply.
BRIGID BAPTISTE STOOD in the lounge of her apartment, replacing the ornaments that had fallen from the shelves during her struggle with Magistrate Kane just a few hours before. Abigail was fast asleep in Brigid’s bed, the door pulled closed not so much to allow the girl her privacy as to prevent Brigid’s anxious movements keeping her awake. Not likely, Brigid thought. Abi’s dead to the world now.
It was strange, she realized, walking about an apartment that may not even exist. She knelt, picking up the shattered pieces of a vase that had skittered under the couch during the fracas. I remember Helen, my fellow worker, giving me this when she left the Historical Division, Brigid thought. Did she really give it to me? Is it really broken? Or is it all just make-believe? The pattern on the vase was familiar—a dog, its face now split in three pieces.
Brigid took the pieces, placing them carefully on her open palm. Then she walked across the small apartment to the trash receptacle in the kitchen area and tossed the colored shards inside.
“I don’t know what’s real anymore,” Brigid whispered, frightened by the words coming out of her mouth. “I don’t even know if I’m real.”
She leaned forward and pressed the green button marked Trash on the receptacle, watched as the vacuum activated and the shards of the vase disappeared, swept away into the Cobaltville trash system to be dumped in the Epsilon Level storage area before final destruction.
KANE ENTERED HIS apartment and pressed the play button on his comm unit before he made his way to the fridge.
“Good morning, Kane.” The answer unit on the comm spoke in its artificial voice as Kane peered into the fridge, wondering what he wanted. Morning? Kane thought, checking his wrist chron automatically and seeing it was almost 2:00 a.m. It had turned into a hell of a long day, he thought as he reached for the jug of cooled fruit juice in the refrigerator.
“You have no new messages. You have one old message, received yesterday at 10:07 p.m. Playing…”
A woman’s voice came over the speaker then, the familiar voice of Kane’s mother, and her face appeared on-screen, those smiling eyes, so full of life, peering from beneath the curtain of brunette hair. “Kane, darling,” she began. “Are you there? No? I guess you must still be working. I was just calling to see if we could move our lunch date an hour forward tomorrow. Nothing important, just some new shipment coming to the gallery that Jeff wants me to evaluate, so I need to be back for three o’clock.”
Balancing the jug of fruit juice, Kane walked over and peered at the tiny screen of the comm. The beautiful woman was shrugging, as though the whole thing was ludicrous. “Well, anyway,” she continued, “I’ll be at the café at twelve-thirty, okay, honey? I’ll see you there, I hope. Let me know if it’s a problem, okay?” She paused then, and Kane watched as her hand reached toward the screen to disconnect the communication. She stopped and looked back at the screen, her beautiful, chocolate-rich eyes peering into the camera lens that captured her image. “Don’t forget how proud of you I am, okay? I couldn’t ask for a better son.”
Abruptly, the picture disappeared and the machine’s mechanical voice spoke once more. “Message ends. No further messages.”
Kane stood by the comm, still clutching the jug of juice as he peered at the blank screen. “Maybe Baptiste is right. Everything we want is here,” he muttered to himself.
Sitting on the dilapidated couch, Kane poured a glass of juice from the jug, considering his words. But it’s not enough, he realized as he pressed Play once again on the answer comm, feeling empty inside.